


These Bones

by SuzumePaige



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: "All I got left is my bones.", Drinking, Gen, drinking buddies, sexual references to toasters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-15
Updated: 2018-11-15
Packaged: 2019-08-24 01:21:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16630193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SuzumePaige/pseuds/SuzumePaige
Summary: I've been watching ST since middle school, thanks to having an unrepentant geek for a father. TOS will always be my favorite and the first of the reboot movies kept the heart of all the things I loved about the first crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise. It's rare for me to write stories that don't include (or who am I kidding, center around) smut when it's for fandom, but these boys light my fire without having to get busy.





	These Bones

**Author's Note:**

> I've been watching ST since middle school, thanks to having an unrepentant geek for a father. TOS will always be my favorite and the first of the reboot movies kept the heart of all the things I loved about the first crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise. It's rare for me to write stories that don't include (or who am I kidding, center around) smut when it's for fandom, but these boys light my fire without having to get busy.

"You know, you say she got the planet in the divorce." Jim shakes his head one too many times--an act courtesy of the whiskey they’ve both been drowning in--and wiggles a finger in McCoy’s general direction. "But. I mean," and he flops back against his chair with enough thoughtless force for the furniture to groan, "we got a democracy here on Earth." Jim's lips slide left and then right before slicking back from teeth in a grin. "Last time I checked, Mississippi was. You know. Still a state in the Union."

"Bet you passed your third grade Social Sciences class with flying colors," McCoy says into his glass, tipping it back to drop the rest of the amber liquid down his throat. 

"That's your problem." Jim taps the tabletop. " _Defensive._ " He nods with as much gravitas as the wisest man in the universe. Since Tiberius is a ridiculous name, McCoy assumes that Jim's T. must really stand for Thickheaded. And James Thickheaded Kirk continues, “which means that you’re just running away. No--wait, I’ll make it sound nice. You’re _conceeding._ ”

McCoy pushes fingers through his hair and sighs before sitting back and raising a hand, snapping at the woman serving drinks. 

In their short time in California McCoy has learned that there are Academy bars and then there is _this_ , and Jim likes the Academy bars because the skirts are short and the fights easy to find but once in a great while McCoy gets his way and the two of them end up here, listening to old country rock and drinking whiskey that doesn't taste like bottled Horta piss. He thinks that it might show his age; he doesn't know just what the hell a Slusho is, and he probably wouldn't want to drink it even if he did.

He points to his empty glass and the blonde nods--she's older than he is and he likes that too because some days he feels like he's the oldest damn cadet at the Academy. Another check in the plus column for this place: human wait staff. Not that he's got anything against alien busboys but you never know how clean the glasses really are. Human physiology just isn't made to fend off interstellar disease and that, McCoy thinks, is exactly why God designed man to keep his feet on the ground. 

“Tell me I’m wrong,” Jim slurs, all booze and bad ideas. “Dare you.”

"Excuse me if I don't like to throw around the details of my personal life. Not all of us are lucky enough to have a chronicle of our history down at the station as part of public record."

Jim blows air through his lips. "Information is _easy_."

McCoy takes his new drink from the woman before she can even put it down on the water-stained wood. "So says the easiest man in the Milky Way," he mutters before downing half of it and wondering why, on the night of the anniversary he longer celebrates, he couldn't have found himself a drinking buddy that was a little more morose. There's no damn reason for Jim to smile so much.

"Only the Milky Way? I knew there was a good reason for joining Starfleet." Jim smacks their waitress on the ass and she returns the favor upside his head. He grins as he rubs the spot and McCoy wonders how many times he was dropped as a child. It would explain a lot.

"You'd screw a toaster if it could say yes," he says, scraping the sting of whiskey off his bottom lip with his teeth, trying not to picture what a courtship between Jim Kirk and a kitchen appliance might conceivably look like.

Jim laughs, a sound that all the bluegrass twang in the universe couldn't cover up completely. He slings one arm over the back of his chair and leans to his left and McCoy can't help but think about the inevitable stress injuries that Jim's going to get from favoring that side. God forbid he ever _does_ get a hold of his own ship--the assprint on the captain's chair would be something to behold. "Imagine if toasters _could_ give consent," Jim says. "Because you know how the sides close together when you push the button down..."

"Dear God, Jim." McCoy stiffles the urge to cover his ears and just goes for the whiskey instead. Now he can see it and he wishes like hell that he couldn't.

"And anyway." Jim turns his glass around in a circle on the tabletop before lifting it. He doesn't drink but looks across the rim at McCoy. "Least I'm screwing something. Unless there's a vow of celibacy that doctors have to take that I'm unaware of. Is that a part of the oath?"

"Why don't you just stick to Command and leave the Sciences to people who know that there's more to anatomy than the female sex organs," McCoy says into his glass.

Jim clears his throat and holds his whiskey to the side, putting a hand on his heart and speaking with all the cadance of an elementary-school stage performance: "I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm--” he winks and goes off script, because Jim is always off-script, “--unless that remembering forces me into a physical union that might be in any way fun or gratifying."

It doesn't surprise McCoy that Jim can recite the Hippocratic oath well enough to be able to pervert it. That is Jim Kirk in a nutshell--learn everything just so you know exactly what excuse to give when you're breaking code, rank, or honor. "You do understand why we're here, don't you?" McCoy asks, because sometimes he honestly doubts that Starfleet is anything more to Jim than a decision based on a dare and a hangover.

Whiskey sloshes as Jim puts his glass down. "I understand why I'm here, but I'm still trying to figure out what your salvaged bones are doing in a cadet uniform, Mr McCoy."

McCoy hates it when Jim calls him that. Jim knows it, which is, McCoy assumes, the reason he does it. He looks at the waitress but doesn't wave her down again because he can feel how far away his toes are starting to get. Standing up is going to be an adventure. McCoy rubs his face. "Mr McCoy was my father."

Jim bites the inside edge of his thumb for a moment while the noise of the dive stumbles around them, thick, clumsy, and slow but the good kind of warm. Then he smiles and hooks both elbows over the corners of his chairback. "So what are you doing in a cadet uniform, _Bones_?"

McCoy looks up. He can't contest the name--it's ironically appropriate, though he assumes that Jim probably means it in the dirtiest, most backhanded complimentary sort of way. Either way, today it fits.

"She got the chief attending position," McCoy finally says, "she got the farm, she got full custody." He slouches forward in his seat and puts his elbows on the table. "There was nothing left on the planet that I wanted."

Jim pushes his remaining whiskey across the table. "Let me buy you a drink."

So maybe his feet are too far away and they’ll both have to hold each other upright as they stumble back to the dorms, but McCoy takes the offered drink because it's against his own code of ethics to refuse good alcohol. "You can buy me two," he says. 

Jim nods and smiles, the good drinking buddy he is.


End file.
